"[F]or me it boils down to this: a large section is a joy. I get to share my passion for my field with hundreds of students at a time, and that's rewarding... Like many performers love a packed house, I love a packed lecture. I'm more organized and more on top of my game in one. I have more fun teaching this way, and I think that energy makes me a better teacher." (Cynthia Pury, "," Chronicle of Higher Education, 2022)
In the academic year 2022-23, 麻豆传媒映画出品 State enrolled around 65 courses with 100 or more students. In addition, the merging of fully online courses in Blackboard created 3-4 more. About half of the total were graduate-level courses. Overall, about 9,500 unique students enrolled in at least one very large enrollment course in AY 2022-23.
Although the stereotype of the large college course is one where students are gathered together in a lecture hall for a freshman or sophomore liberal arts class, large enrollment courses can be found in all 麻豆传媒映画出品 State colleges and the Lifelong Learning program, and only about 20% of them are offered fully in-person (TCI). The rest are hybrid (48%) or fully online (32%).
Most VLEs have only one instructor, although GTA support, Supplemental Instruction, and Embedded Librarian support is common. In addition, most of these courses also use Blackboard, whether or not the course is fully online. While hybrid and fully online courses do tend to see the most instructor activity in Blackboard, in-person course instructors are nearly as likely to rely on Blackboard for part of their instruction. In fact, if we rank the very large enrollment courses in AY 2022-23 by instructor Blackboard use, the distribution of course modality is split nearly evenly with 4 of the top ten courses being hybrid, 3 being fully online, and 3 being fully in-person.
This issue of Teaching Today is dedicated to these courses and the instructors and staff that support them. Whether you work with a very large enrollment course or not, we hope you find this issue informative and interesting. As always, if you have any questions, please contact the Office of Instructional Resources.